So last week I wrote about zucchetti and promised to give you a meat sauce to use with it. True to my word, here it is…and it’s easy and pretty quick (only cooks for 30 minutes)! It makes a lot, but the great news is it’s one of those foods that freezes beautifully. I freeze it in individual portions and then just pull one out of the freezer whenever I want a quick meal.

This is one of those recipes where you can use any ground meat and still end up with a tasty sauce. You can use beef, buffalo, pork, chicken, turkey, veal, ostrich, or sausage or any other ground meat or combination of meats you can think of.
Enjoy!Continue reading Mama’s Meat Sauce→

Despite the fact that I grew up in a family that loved good food, the number of different cuisines we tried was pretty much limited to Hungarian, Italian, Chinese, French, and Deli. It wasn’t until after college that I first had Japanese food and then it took me another 30 years before I tried sushi. In those before-sushi-years my go to dish was always beef sukiyaki. I loved the flavors as well as the show they put on when they cooked it at your table.

Fast forward many years – I’m a vegetarian and writing my book “1,000 Vegetarian Recipes” and as you can imagine, I’m trying to find diverse recipes for each chapter. Memories of beef sukiyaki float to my mind and before you know it I developed a great tofu sukiyaki. I will say that of the 1,000 recipes in that book, the tofu sukiyaki was probably one of the top ten I made over and over…you can tell by looking at the soy sauce stains on the page. In fact one it was one of the things that I really missed when I became paleo.

Never to be one to pass up a challenge, this week I set my mind to paleo sukiyaki. I went back to the original beef sukiyaki that started my love for it and then set about converting the sauce to paleo approved ingredients. Surprisingly it was really easy to achieve a super delicious version.

Coconut aminos, that I usually find to be a somewhat less than perfect substitute for soy sauce, turns out to be a natural for sukiyaki. Because the sauce for sukiyaki is quite sweet, the sweetness of the aminos allowed me to eliminate the need for sugar in the recipe. I added just a little fish sauce to intensify the saltiness and that was it!

I use dried mushrooms I also bought in Chinatown. To be honest I have no idea what kind they are. They were in an open bin along with lots of other types of mushrooms and I just pointed to number 1046 and hoped it was good. I think dried shiitaki mushrooms would be a good substitute. For the fresh mushrooms I used a mixture of white and brown beech mushrooms as well as enoki. Just regular white mushrooms, sliced would also work here.

For me this recipe is a real success and I’ll be making it often. Hope you like it too.

What says summer more than grilling? As I sit in my den and the temperature outside is 11F, the idea of grilling is really appealing.

Living in an apartment in New York City is, in most things – Great. However, having an outdoor grill tends to be problematic. I figure even people with outdoor grills may be interested in indoor grills for December, January and February. So let’s look at the options for indoor grilling.

First, and probably easiest is the broiler in your stove. You already own it and anything that can be grilled can be broiled – the only difference is you never get those pretty grill marks.

Also available for use with/on the stove are stove top grill pans. The Murphy pan and variations of it are pans (frequently cast iron) with ridges that you heat over your burner/s. They do pretty good job of grilling. The food gets cooked nicely and has pretty grill marks, but not the same char flavor that comes from direct heat.

A second type of stovetop grill is this smokeless grill, I used to own one but it took too long to grill and was so big it wasn’t worth the storage space.

There are also lots of electric griddles/grills, Google them or go to Amazon to see the huge variety available to you.

I want to talk about the one I own The Griddler

For many years I owned/used the George Foreman grill – and frankly it did a fine job, especially considering how affordable it is. I found I was using it very often but it was kind of small. So I started shopping for a slightly better replacement and ended up with The Griddler made by Cuisinart.

Here’s what I love about it – it does a great job; it cooks meats quickly searing the outside beautifully; it’s both a grill and griddle; you can open it and lie it flat – which is great when you are making pancakes for a crowd; it’s easy to clean (though I confess I could do a better job of that) – the metal plates pop out easily; it has a waffle option; it’s not hideously expensive (about $80). On the down side, like the stovetop grills, the char flavor is not the same as an outdoor grill.

The litmus test for kitchen equipment is: will I use it often enough to waste precious counter space for it – and The Griddler earns a definite YES!

I really love kitchen gadgets. The problem is I need a bigger kitchen to store all the gadgets I’d like to have. On the other hand there are also plenty of gadgets that I think are just a waste of money (not to mention valuable storage space). Vertical roasters fall somewhere between great gadget and waste of money. They are available in the whole gamut of prices – I’ve seen them for as little as $3.99 and as much as $229.00. I honestly don’t know if they work differently enough to warrent the price differential.

Why roast vertically? Two reasons: The skin is crisp all around the chicken, not just on top; and the chicken cooks more evenly. That’s because the metal tube on the inside conducts heat cooking the chicken from both inside and out instead of just from outside in. So here’s my solution to the should I buy a vertical roaster…the bundt pan. It’s something I have on hand and can do the same thing as the vertical roaster – in fact it’s even better because you can cook the vegetables and make sauce in the bundt pan – which is a feature only of the very high end vertical roasters. There is a down side to using a bundt pan and that’s that you can really only make a smallish (about 3 to 3 1/2 pound) chicken on it. Larger chickens just won’t balance on the short tube in the bundt pan. On the other hand, I already own (and store) bundt pans and further, I rarely cook chickens larger than 3 1/2 pounds. So this kitchen trick works for me.